This week, the North Shore of Oʻahu is in the middle of something hard. A Kona Low system brought catastrophic flooding to Haleʻiwa and Waialua in the third week of March — the worst in more than twenty years. Families lost homes. Roads flooded. The old Wahiawa Dam became a source of fear for 5,500 people under evacuation orders. And then, when the mandatory evacuation was lifted, volunteers showed up with pressure washers, mops, and food. Churches opened their doors. Neighbors lifted one another out of the mud.

That response is exactly who this community has always been. And it’s why I want to tell you about Haleʻiwa today — not despite the storm, but because of it.
Real estate is not just about property. It’s about the people who share the land. In Haleʻiwa, those people have been rooting themselves in the same soil for well over a century. What happened this week reminded me of what that kind of community looks like when it’s tested.

Let’s go to the North Shore.

Haleʻiwa sits at the northern terminus of the H-2 Freeway, where Kamehameha Highway curves through a stand of hau trees toward the Pacific and the world changes. The name means “house of the ʻiwa,” the Hawaiian name for the magnificent frigate bird — a seabird known for riding thermals without effort and returning, always, to the same place.

The town was shaped by Benjamin Dillingham, who built the first luxury hotel in Hawaiʻi here in 1899 and gave the community its enduring name. Plantation workers — Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Portuguese — built their homes and businesses along Kamehameha Highway in the early twentieth century. The sugar mills closed. The surf culture arrived. The town held.

In 1984, Haleʻiwa became one of only a handful of state-designated historic, cultural and scenic districts in Hawaiʻi. That designation is not decorative. It is the reason the town still looks like itself.

A Mile of Shops, A Century of Story

Walk Kamehameha Highway through town and you’re walking through a living archive. The buildings date to the plantation era. The businesses inside many of them date to the families who arrived with the sugar industry and never left.

Matsumoto Shave Ice opened in 1951 as a grocery store. This February, they celebrated 75 years at the same address. Across the street, Aoki’s Shave Ice carries a story that goes back even further: the Shimoda family was serving shave ice at the old Haleʻiwa Theater in the 1930s, using a machine brought from Japan by Michael Aoki’s grandfather. The family opened Aoki’s as a shop in 1981, and Cathy Aoki — fourth generation — runs it today.

Art galleries, surf shops, a Saturday farmers market, a paddling club, and a harbor where kayaks and stand-up paddleboards launch into the Anahulu River — it’s a full life inside one square mile.

Why It Matters Right Now

The March 2026 Kona Low floods did not spare Haleʻiwa. Low-lying areas near Kaukonahua Stream and the Anahulu River took the worst of it. Streets became rivers. Homes were lifted off foundations.

But within 48 hours, the town answered. Volunteers lined up from Haleʻiwa to Mokuleia. This is not coincidence. A shared faith and a multi-generational commitment to this place is what drives that kind of response. The Waialua United Church of Christ opened as a donation distribution center. North Shore Christian Fellowship mobilized its congregation. When the storm came, the churches were the anchors.

Haleʻiwa has never been designed for developers. Its built environment emerged from the land, from the plantation era, and from the specific needs of families who fished, surfed, farmed, and raised children here for generations.

The town core features low-slung commercial buildings from the early twentieth century, many still clad in wood with corrugated metal awnings. The residential streets behind them hold a mix of plantation-era bungalows, mid-century beach cottages on small lots, and the occasional newer single-family home on a larger parcel. Almost nothing is over two stories. The scale of Haleʻiwa is human.

Interiors: Function First, Aloha Always

Inside Haleʻiwa homes, the design philosophy is practical and warm rather than aspirational and sterile. Lanais are used, not displayed. Outdoor showers are standard. Wide-plank floors handle sand. Breezeways replace air conditioning in older homes.

The newer renovations appearing along Kamehameha Highway and the side streets near the harbor show an interesting tension: quartz countertops and waterfall islands in kitchens that open to lush, informal yards where chickens and fruit trees coexist in easy harmony. The North Shore does not require its homes to be consistent. It only asks them to be honest.

Outdoor Living: The Real Room

On the North Shore, the lānai is not a feature. It’s the point. Every well-designed home in Haleʻiwa treats outdoor living as the primary living space and the interior as the backup. Fruit trees — mango, papaya, banana, ʻulu (breadfruit) — are not landscape ornaments. They are food.

Many lots back up against agricultural land or stream corridors, which means the views are green and the yard extends mentally into something much larger than the TMK. Larger AG-zoned parcels outside the town core offer 1–7+ acres, and are among the few remaining opportunities on Oʻahu to build a genuine working homestead.

I want to tell you something that happened to me this week.

My brother lives in Haleiwa. When the Kona Low hit the North Shore on March 20, his property flooded like all the neighbors. The mud came in fast and it came in deep, the kind that gets into everything and weighs more than you expect.

I went to help.

When I arrived, a man named Kaipo was already there. He had not come alone. He brought a team — twelve, maybe fifteen people — and they worked. Shoveling. Hauling. Moving mounds of wet debris to the edge of the property.

And when the team was finishing up, Kaipo stopped to talk story with my brother and me in the way that only happens when something real has just passed between people.

He told us his family has lived in Haleiwa since before the Rainbow Bridge was built.

That bridge — the double-arched concrete span over the Anahulu River that everyone photographs — was built in 1921. Kaipo's great-great-grandfather arrived before that. He came to work, the way so many did in those years. He stayed. He put down roots. And his family has been on that same land ever since.

As he told it, Kaipo experienced the same storm as my brother. He was cleaning up his own property then decided to go help a neighbor.

I keep coming back to that.

This week's newsletter is about Haleiwa. But it's really about Kaipo. And about what you find when you look at a community not through its real estate listings or its famous surf breaks, but through the people who have been keeping it alive for more than a hundred years.

A morning in Haleʻiwa starts where the town’s identity was forged: on the water. Waimea Bay draws swimmers in summer when the surf is flat and the water is a warm, improbable blue. The harbor is alive with kayakers and paddleboarders before eight. Up on the hill at Pūpūkea, dawn patrol surfers at Shark’s Cove are already in the water.

By mid-morning, Kamehameha Highway is awake. The line outside Matsumoto Shave Ice forms early, a mix of visitors, regulars, and families who have been coming since childhood. Around the corner, Aoki’s opens a little later and tends to attract the locals who know the Shimoda family’s story and prefer their flavors — the North Shore combo of mango, lilikoi, and guava with a splash of li hing mui is a very particular kind of delicious.

By afternoon, the galleries are open. Haleʻiwa Art Gallery has been showcasing local and regional artists for decades. The boutiques carry everything from hand-stamped aloha shirts made in Hawaiʻi to locally-shaped surfboards to handmade jewelry using materials gathered from the island. The North Shore Marketplace is an eclectic cluster of shops and food trucks that draws the surfing set and the casual browser equally.

The Sea Turtles, the Surf, and the Sacred Coast

Five minutes north of town, Laniakea Beach hosts Hawaiian green sea turtles (honu) who rest on the sand daily. Volunteers from the Sea Turtle Environmental Education Program (STEEP) are there most mornings, keeping a respectful perimeter. It’s a small miracle of place — a wild animal sharing the coastline with humans in a relationship of mutual accommodation.

The Seven-Mile Miracle stretch east of Haleʻiwa — Pipeline, Rocky Point, Sunset Beach, Velzy Land — is the reason surf culture exists as a global phenomenon. In winter, the world’s best surfers are your neighbors. The Triple Crown of Surfing and the Eddie Aikau Invitational at Waimea Bay are not events you watch on television. They are events you walk to.

Community Life: The Roots Run Deep

Saturday mornings bring the Haleʻiwa Farmers Market and a pace of community life that feels different from anything you’ll find in urban Honolulu. The North Shore is small enough that faces become familiar quickly. The faith communities — North Shore Christian Fellowship, the Waialua United Church of Christ, and others across the corridor — anchor the social fabric in visible, practical ways.

What ties them together is not a single denomination. It is a shared commitment to the people around them. In March 2026, that commitment moved people to show up with shovels at 7 a.m. the morning after the worst flood in a generation, not because anyone asked them to, but because that’s what it means to live here.

In 2003, someone on the North Shore of O'ahu was trying to think of something meaningful to put on the main screen of their Nokia phone. They landed on the greater-than symbol.

The phrase "HE>i" went on the screen. Friends saw it. The conversation started. A small group began making shirts, hats, and stickers for themselves, occasionally selling at Christian concerts and art shows. The concept was simple. The message was clear. And in the right community, that was enough.

By 2007, the concept had found its business form. Chris Ballard partnered with Kaimana and Kainoa Palmer — two brothers from the North Shore who had been the creative foundation of the idea since the beginning. [Per Chris Ballard, March 2026]

Chris brought what the concept needed to scale: operational execution, systems, the ability to take a great idea and build a sustainable business around it. The Palmer brothers brought the creative: the design instinct, the cultural fluency, the authentic North Shore voice that the brand needed to be taken seriously by the community it served.

Together, they were set.

The first physical shop opened in 2008 — a small space in a Waialua strip mall, open three days a week. It was enough to prove that the demand was real.

Around 2010, they took the leap. A storefront on Kamehameha Highway in Hale'iwa — the former Pizza Hut location at what is now 66-437 Kamehameha Highway, Suite 103 — became the HE>i Hale'iwa store. The heart of the town's main street.

The store grew. The products connected. The stickers spread across the island. International customers found the website. A second location opened in Honolulu. The brand reached worldwide — shipping from a small town of under 5,000 people on O'ahu's North Shore.

On March 22, 2026, Chris Ballard and his wife were clearing flood debris from a cottage on my brother's Hale'iwa property. They were part of Kaipo's volunteer team — neighbors showing up for neighbors the morning after the worst flood in twenty years.

Chris did not arrive in a branded shirt. He arrived with his wife and his hands and the willingness to do the work that was in front of him. During a break, he told my brother the story. The Nokia phone. The greater-than symbol. The brothers. The strip mall in Waialua. The leap of faith to Kamehameha Highway.

The brand that tells the story of putting Jesus first — HE>i, He is greater than I — was being lived out in the mud of a flooded cottage on a Sunday afternoon. Not as a statement. Just as a fact.

That is what this community makes people into.

Visit HE>i and check out the Garage Tee, the hottest item in their collection, and the stickers. I love the stickers!

Hale'iwa: 66-437 Kamehameha Highway, Suite 103, Hale'iwa, HI 96712
Honolulu: 1130 N. Nimitz Highway, Honolulu, HI 96817
Online: www.hegreaterthani.com

No other town on Oʻahu gives you this in one walkable stretch: a morning surf at Waimea Bay, a shave ice from a shop that has served the same recipes since the Eisenhower administration, sea turtles resting on the sand at Laniakea Beach by afternoon, and local art in a gallery housed in a plantation-era building at sunset — all inside a historic town that has held the same character for over a century. Haleʻiwa is the only address on Oʻahu where surf legend, living history, community faith, and island beauty are not separate things. They are the same thing.

Haleʻiwa and Waialua are still in recovery mode as of this newsletter. If you want to support the community:

This is a people-first community. If you live here or love here, now is the time to show it.

Ready to explore Haleʻiwa? Let’s talk. Schedule a time to connect.